How 3M Discovered, Then Concealed, the Dangers of Forever/PFAS Chemicals: The New Yorker
- How 3M Discovered, Then Concealed, the Dangers of Forever Chemicals, The New Yorker, May 20, 2024. - The company found its own toxic compounds in human blood—and kept selling them.
(This article is a collaboration between The New Yorker and ProPublica).
Kris Hansen had worked as a chemist at the 3M Corporation for about a year when her boss, an affable senior scientist named Jim Johnson, gave her a strange assignment. 3M had invented Scotch Tape and Post-it notes; it sold everything from sandpaper to kitchen sponges. But on this day, in 1997, Johnson wanted Hansen to test human blood for chemical contamination.
Several of 3M’s most successful products contained man-made compounds called fluorochemicals.
In a spray called Scotchgard, fluorochemicals protected leather and fabric from stains. In a coating known as Scotchban, they prevented food packaging from getting soggy. In a soapy foam used by firefighters, they helped extinguish jet-fuel fires. Johnson explained to Hansen that one of the company’s fluorochemicals, PFOS—short for perfluorooctanesulfonic acid—often found its way into the bodies of 3M factory workers.
Although he said that they were unharmed, he had recently hired an outside lab to measure the levels in their blood.
The lab had just reported something odd, however. For the sake of comparison, it had tested blood samples from the American Red Cross, which came from the general population and should have been free of fluorochemicals. Instead, it kept finding a contaminant in the blood. Johnson asked Hansen to figure out whether the lab had made a mistake. Detecting trace levels of chemicals was her specialty: she had recently written a doctoral dissertation about tiny particles in the atmosphere.
Hansen’s team of lab technicians and junior scientists fetched a blood sample from a lab-supply company and prepped it for analysis. Then Hansen switched on an oven-size box known as a mass spectrometer, which weighs molecules so that scientists can identify them. As the lab equipment hummed around her, Hansen loaded a sample into the machine. A graph appeared on the mass spectrometer’s display; it suggested that there was a compound in the blood that could be PFOS. That’s weird, Hansen thought.
Why would a chemical produced by 3M show up in people who had never worked for the company?...
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2024/05/27/3m-forever-chemicals-pfas-pfos-toxic
= new reply since forum marked as read
upholstery, paper plates and cups, cookware, food packaging, paper towels, coats, book bags, sneakers and more are covered with these toxins.. 
What Isn't coated with PFAS I want to know.
It was the 3M executives that concealed the evidence from the public. That's how they preserved their annual bonuses for so many years. It puts them on the same level as the executives at Monsanto.
